Category Archives: Islamic terrorism

the comforting feeling that they understood the inner or hidden workings of the world; that they were far superior in this understanding to those who did not adhere to it; and that they were participating in something far bigger than themselves. It gave them an illusion of transcendence.

Dalrymple points out that although many Marxists claimed that communist Russia’s downfall did not affect their faith in the truth of their secular religion,

Marxism as an intellectual system was deeply discredited by the now-undeniable failure of the Soviet Union to deliver on any of its utopian promises.

On the contrary, Marxism

provided the pretext for the murder, as well as causing the miserable living conditions, of many millions of people; and it was as implausible to deny the connection of these with Marxism as it is now to deny the connection of terrorism with Islam.

Correct opinion, Dalrymple notes, is nine-tenths of virtue. Anyone with wrong opinions is morally wrong: worse than a thief, a delinquent or a drunk, and much worse than a womaniser. Virtue is not the exercise of a discipline but the expression of an opinion; this has the happy effect of liberating behaviour.

For the Cæsaropapists, as Dalrymple calls them, words like racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic are wonderfully elastic. Such epithets have negative connotations, of course; as to their denotations, well, they denote anything that the powerful, or those aspiring to power, say they denote. The point is not just to exercise power but to entrench it, moulding minds and obviating resistance.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ (Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, Mervyn Peake illustration)

Dalrymple points out that in a world where representations of reality are more important than reality itself, control of the meanings of words is as important as, or more important than, control of parliaments.

Take racism. It is, Dalrymple notes, no longer the doctrine that certain groups of people are inferior; it now means opposition to political prescriptions, often extraordinarily bureaucratic and job-multiplying, supposed to counteract racism. A racist is no longer a member of a gang that goes about lynching people, or an advocate of segregation in buses; it is someone who harbours doubts about, say, affirmative action, who apprehends that such a policy leads to falling standards, that it works against those who, having broken through, wonder if their success might not be due to racial condescension. A racist is also someone who denies that the differing levels of achievement of various groups is attributable entirely to injustice — of the kind that it is the duty of the State to correct.

Dalrymple cites homophobia. It is no longer a wish to outlaw homosexual behaviour; it now applies when, for instance, people raise questions about homosexual marriage, as if such doubts are based on nothing but the most savage hatred. To be homophobic is to be put in the category of a member of a gang that goes around looking for homosexuals to beat up. Even wanting to discuss the matter is ultramontane: to deny the rightness, the good sense, the humanity of homosexual marriage is like believing that the Earth is flat — with this difference, that while the latter is a harmless eccentricity, the former is a moral enormity.

Few fret enough about the homosexual-marriage issue to risk the shame that dissent from orthodoxy would bring down on them if they protested, says Dalrymple. The issue has been decided by asymmetric warfare between a small number of monomaniacal activists, for whom the matter is of existential importance, and a large number of sceptics and opponents, for whom the matter is just one question among many, and not the most important.

This de facto silencing of even the mildest sceptical voices is normally associated with totalitarian dictatorships, Dalrymple notes. The self-imposed restriction on expression of heterodox ideas in public soon becomes self-censorship of our ideas, because none of us likes being a coward. The aim is to deny that there has been any suppression of freedom of thought at all.

To stay out of Hillary’s basket, we must suppress thought or, better still, not think. The more important the subject, the more imperative it is to ignore it. It is our duty, if we do not wish to be classed as deplorable, to rejoice in what we regret, to take pleasure in what we have lost, to see in what is strange nothing but the friendly, the compatible, the enriching.

Dalrymple instances mass immigration. Are we concerned that too large an influx of people soaked in an alien culture will change our way of life? We must learn to curb this irrationality; we should remember that the way of life to which we are so attached is responsible for all the evils of the world, past, present and future. (This is the mirror image of the mission civilisatrice.)

To allow such thoughts to run through our heads even for a moment is to suffer the deplorable condition of Islamophobia. If we wonder whether Mohammedanism is compatible with intellectual freedom, it is a sign of a moral defect as well as of a psychopathology. We have an irrational fear, like that of spiders or of being locked in a room.

Political correctness, says Dalrymple, sows in the educated the fear of ostracism, of being an intellectual leper, of being locked up with the deplorables (to prevent the spread of the disease). And it infuriates the large numbers of people who neither subscribe to it nor benefit from it, and who feel that the energies devoted to trying to decide, for instance, which public toilets transsexuals should be allowed to use, is an insult to their own, much more pressing, problems.

and one by Kamaldeep Bhui, Maria João Silva, Raluca A. Topciu and Edgar Jones on Pathways to sympathies for violent protest and terrorism.

Bognor Regis Chess Club in the great days

Dalrymple writes that in addition to being quite unilluminating, the articles’ conclusions are

as dull as the annual accounts of a local chess club.

The authors

would make Armageddon sound boring.

They are also pusillanimous. We all know, Dalrymple notes,

what kind of terrorism and extremism the authors are thinking of, but the title of neither paper mentions it. We walk permanently on eggshells.

What religion are we talking about? The articles do not tell us. The whole subject

is dealt with in so opaque a fashion that it is difficult not to believe that the authors feared retribution—from the politically correct if not from terrorists themselves. They are like those puppies that, being curious, approach a danger, but then retreat, approach again, and retreat again.

Perhaps the authors wished to prevent readers from drawing the obvious conclusion, that

Enoch Powell had been right all along.

We should all like to know, says Dalrymple,

why some people become terrorists, other than for the most obvious reason: that to kill, maim, and destroy, supposedly for a good cause or some allegedly higher purpose, is a delight to a certain kind of person, worth even dying for. In addition, I doubt that there are many more self-important people than terrorists.

You might think that psychiatry and psychiatrists would be able to shed some light on the matter, but this, Dalrymple points out,

is a manifestation of a modern superstition, that human self-understanding has made great strides pari passu with technical advances such as brain scans and a knowledge of neurochemistry. In fact, we have not advanced beyond Pope’s description of Man as ‘the glory, jest and riddle of the world’.

lies at least as much with us as with them. By our cowardice, often inadvertently, we support and encourage Islamism. There are many stories of Christmas decorations being taken down, no reference to Christmas being made in case it should offend, etc., when no demand from the Muslim population that these things should be done has been made. It is an anticipatory cringe that encourages the extremists to push a little harder at what they think is a half-open door.

A fine US example of this genre, he notes, is the bowdlerisation of Yale University Press’s book on the Jyllands-Posten Mahomed cartoons affair.

Many Islamist terrorists, Dalrymple points out, have gone through a libertine phase. Muslim men in the West very often immerse themselves in libertinism, but if at all reflective, may come to discover that

libertinism is not the answer to life’s dissatisfactions, and will then find a ready-made utopian ideology at hand, one which emerges from their own background and is therefore a source of pride to them.

like the ants that appear on my kitchen surface when there is something sweet left about, lit candles in little glasses appeared. Where do they come from, these candles, and where are they hiding before a massacre, an assassination or a disaster?

Promenade des Anglais

Dalrymple thinks it likely

that all those who light candles and stand or sit looking sad but beatific and virtuous behind or beside them after a terrible event are not religious. They would not be seen dead lighting a candle in a church. But they are probably the kind of people who say they are ‘spiritual but not religious’, that is to say who indulge in all kinds of spiritual kitsch, for instance

reiki therapy

healing chakras of the earth

wind chimes

strategically-placed crystals

Circular Quay, Sydney

What, he asks, is the message?

That they are opposed to massacre or assassination and regret disaster? Does this have to be expressed? Perhaps they are trying to recapture a belief in the transcendent whose very existence they doubt or, in other circumstances, vehemently deny.

Dalrymple says that candles

are a couple of rungs up the spiritual ladder from teddy-bears, the intermediate rung on the ladder being bouquets in cellophane piled high at or near the site of death. The black armband and the mourning dress have been replaced by the teddy-bear, the unwrapped bouquet and the candle in its little glass.

Candles are also

a couple of rungs up the social ladder; the lighters of candles would probably regard teddy-bears as infra dig.

Dalrymple notes that the candles and teddy-bears

must be very comforting for Islamists. When they see them, they must think, ‘These are weak and feeble people, easily intimidated and eminently destructible.’

Browsing in a bookshop at Charles De Gaulle, Dalrymple finds that there is a very extensive section devoted to Islamic terrorism, which, he notes,

has taken over from the Occupation as the favoured theme of non-fiction in France.

Dalrymple is

a good customer for such books, even if I can never quite remember the names of the individual terrorists or of the various terrorist groupuscules that they have joined.

Something to read on the plane

Publishers

can’t go too far wrong, it seems, with books about Hitler or the Occupation, and these days with books about Islamic terrorism.

The fact that terrorism

ought not to be a suitable subject for reading matter in an airport or a passenger aëroplane suggests, however, that in our hearts most of us believe that we are statistically not very likely to be victims of it, and that Islamic terrorism is a vile and stupid nuisance rather than the existential threat to our civilisation as some have claimed it to be. The main danger is from our reaction to it, enfeebled or destructive of our civil liberties (or both) as the case might be.

The dehumanisation of people is one of the mechanisms by which atrocities are committed and accepted

Committing evil for goodness’ sake, writes Dalrymple,

satisfies the inner sadist and the inner moralist at the same time.

That is why, he says, the beheadings in the Middle East and recently in the Philippines are, for those who conduct them,

such fun.

The latest outrage, Dalrymple reports (though he is sceptical about its veracity), is the

freezing to death by ISIS of 45 of their fighters who retreated, or ran away, before the advance of Iraqi forces; ISIS is alleged to have put the men into a freezer in a forensic morgue in Mosul and then put the bodies by the roadside as a warning to other would-be cowards. For myself, I was a little surprised that as sophisticated an institution as a forensic morgue was still in existence and still functioning in the Islamic State.

Dalrymple is interested in a reader’s comment underneath a report of the alleged atrocity. The commenter describes ISIS as vermin, to be eradicated as such. Dalrymple warns:

There is by now good reason to fear resort to such metaphors, the dehumanisation of people being one of the mechanisms by which atrocities are both committed and accepted. We should fear our own worst thoughts and refrain from giving them expression, for far from assuaging such thoughts, expression of them only goes to make them more frequent and more extreme. By means of such thoughts and such expressions, we become a little more like those who are supposedly the occasion of them, who have also persuaded themselves that there exist human vermin in the world to be eradicated.

This is, he says,

a call to decency and self-control, not to political correctness. Political correctness is the means by which we try to control others; decency is the means by which we try to control ourselves. There is no doubt which is the easier to undertake, and the more pleasurable and gratifying. There is a considerable element of sadism in political correctness.

Dalrymple views a report on Muriel Degauque, the first white European suicide bomber. Born and raised in Charleroi, she was a child of ordinary working-class parents.

The television underlined this with lengthy shots of her dreary childhood neighbourhood. Even a few seconds looking at it on a screen was almost enough to provoke an existential crisis.

Her life was unremarkable, said the television report.

She was average at school, then worked in a bakery. People who knew her emphasised that she was an ordinary person—the last kind of person to act in such an outrageous way. There was nothing in her life out of the usual. True, she went through a period of sexual promiscuity and drug-taking, but when she converted to Islam—cut to a Muslim area of Brussels—she gave up drugs and was faithful to her Moroccan husband. So really, the commentary concluded, the whole episode was mysterious and inexplicable.

But only, writes Dalrymple,

in the sense that all human conduct is, in the last analysis, mysterious. Actually, the suicide bomber reminded me of the lost and bewildered young whom various Christian sects would look for as they scoured our streets, trawling for recruits into their all-embracing communities. These communities happened to make lots of money for their founders but really did rescue some young people from the gutter.

The television commentary

made no connection between Degauque’s promiscuity and drug abuse on the one hand and her subsequent conversion to a murderously puritanical form of Islam on the other (she wore the most extreme of veils).

Yet it requires little imagination, says Dalrymple, to make such a connection,

for one interpretation of her former life was that she sought to fill a void, a lack of purpose or interest, with sensation. Once the self-defeating nature of this was obvious to her—and nothing suggests that she lacked intelligence, despite her mediocre academic background—she became vulnerable to a ‘complete’ answer to life’s problems. Her death demonstrated, to herself and to others, how deeply (or desperately) she believed in it.

Her problem—a lack of meaning in her life—is

far from unique. Millions of people are in the same or similar position. That is why Europe cannot afford to be complacent about it.